DA and Facebook would be the best bet, if the comic authors had twitters too and tweeted when they put up a new comic and directed people to the site we'd get some attention as well.

Also do we have anyone capable of doing another flash game? That's the wagon I rolled in on (admittedly I only posted for a couple weeks and then came back for RP) so we know it worked that time at least.

As for securing against bots there are 2 options I can think of, some form of captcha in the registration (is there one? Is it that shitty 6 letter one?) or require a minimum number of posts to post a thread. 5 seems to be standard on a lot of places.

We could also just deal with it, maybe make some sub-mod janitors who can only move threads to a trash bin to be deleted by others. Don't even give them a title or colors just have them to move bot threads.

These are some spam settings I have on an old phpBB2 forum. I don't know if these settings are available on whatever phpBB we're using, or if these settings are actually part of an addon. My newest forum installation is run on different software and enables a custom captcha question which seems to have stopped new bot registrations on my forum, at least for now.

"Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits."

These are some spam settings I have on an old phpBB2 forum. I don't know if these settings are available on whatever phpBB we're using, or if these settings are actually part of an addon. My newest forum installation is run on different software and enables a custom captcha question which seems to have stopped new bot registrations on my forum, at least for now.

Requiring captcha for posts under a certain number looks like an even better idea, it's a small annoyance for people versus a serious challenge for bots. Could even make it 10-15 posts like that.

Dark Dragon wrote:Those are admin settings. Botters have just developed new software that supposedly bypasses most/all recent versions CAPTCHA.

What do you mean by 'just'? Captcha has never been 100% effective, but it's not 0% effective either.

Perhaps the guy behind the bots is manually filling in the captcha? Nothing will work then.

And yes it happens, there are people with that much time on their hands.

Alternatively I came across this, not sure if it would work but it's an idea.

a simple option is to add an extra field with a tempting name like “email” to your form that is then hidden using CSS. Humans can’t see the field and as a result will never fill it out. Any request that comes in with the field completed can easily be eliminated as spam.

See, I am worried that if we can't control the bot tide, we will have to make registration a moderator-approved thing, which means I would have add a shit ton more moderators, and then tier the moderators into Door Guards, and City Patrolmen (if you will).

I am emailing and emailing and emailing Dave and EVENTUALLY I get a response but it is tiring, lemme tell ya.

Hopefully not, because I clearly stated that I don't approve of that solution other than some kind of temporary buffer should other means to deal with it be delayed. Besides, how many mods it would require would depend on the traffic.

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Mir@k wrote:Weren't the new mods modded precisely for that function? Or i missed something.

I wanted more than just three people moderating the forums period, because as cool as the word Triumvirate is, it isn't feasible here. More mods would be specifically there only to rifle down the zombie robot hordes slamming at the gates and let survivors in. :P

Q.U. wrote:Hopefully not, because I clearly stated that I don't approve of that solution other than some kind of temporary buffer should other means to deal with it be delayed. Besides, how many mods it would require would depend on the traffic.

In this following statement, I am not quoting statistics, but going by feel, so I could be absolutely wrong by my ratios and maths entirely, but the pattern I felt went about like this:

When we were open, we were getting steadily dozens of new members over the course of a month or two. Of those, a third never posted again or only once ever few months on a comic update. About half go and stick to a particular forum but still are sporadic and don't post much. The remaining sixth are those who explore and try to become a part of the community actively, and regularly post once having joined--generally they go to RP or Spam for their activity, too, I would like to make note, finding it quite interesting.

We have no solid way of telling, right now, because of our forums' software being REALLY out of date, when a user who registers is a robot, and so we have to nuke them after they've joined, which is why we would need more moderators who could perform pretty much just that duty.

But I agree with Q.U. here: We shouldn't need to have additional mods.

Out of sheer coincidence, I would like to mention how I am glad that both Q.U. and Grey are in Europe, so we have better coverage time-zone wise, if even a little bit. Not sure where Valhallen lives. He's a riddle shrouded in enigma wrapped in mystery. But he's fucking Ess Em Are Tee SMRT smart.

When we were open, we were getting steadily dozens of new members over the course of a month or two. Of those, a third never posted again or only once ever few months on a comic update. About half go and stick to a particular forum but still are sporadic and don't post much. The remaining sixth are those who explore and try to become a part of the community actively, and regularly post once having joined--generally they go to RP or Spam for their activity, too, I would like to make note, finding it quite interesting.

I think many new users stay in the New/Updates section. It's literally riddled with people from 2011 and 2012. But those are mostly the ones, as you said, who only post once in a while to comment on a new page. Some of them do leak to the Bleed forums or the general forums too though. Generally users who do wish to venture out of their sections will inevitable end up in sections where there is activity. Which is why RP and Spam seem to be getting new ones.

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I wept when the news forum was first made. It is my honest opinion that everything regarding forum activity went downhill (or for the usual skeptics, downhill faster). The news forum completely FUCKED the influx of new members to the bleed forum because newbies saw the automatically generated update posts by "bleedman" and assumed it was him who was really posting there, so of course newbies would want to stick to the place where their hero posted instead of that other rickety place that had people saying bleedman rarely posts there.

Mir@k wrote:I wept when the news forum was first made. It is my honest opinion that everything regarding forum activity went downhill (or for the usual skeptics, downhill faster). The news forum completely FUCKED the influx of new members to the bleed forum because newbies saw the automatically generated update posts by "bleedman" and assumed it was him who was really posting there, so of course newbies would want to stick to the place where their hero posted instead of that other rickety place that had people saying bleedman rarely posts there.

i am not sure but i don't think hiding it would fix anything, really--whoever set up the programming interaction between the main pages for comics and their posting did so at a level of Founder Administration, the very last echelon of options I can't use, I believe.

It's interesting how people here tend to herd themselves towards the comic updates and news, since it is what probably drew them in the first place, and disappear until something else interesting appears. Of course, that means they completely avoid everything else, thinking they're insignificant since they don't relate to comics in a place with comics in its name.

Then again, comic sites like SinFest and BittersweetCandyBowl have a more active forum crowd in comparison, mostly due to a more mature or active crowd of people with argumentative abilities beyond the usual 'OMG MAKE MORE PANTYSHOTS MANG'. This would mean that in order to remedy the membership problem, would be to make the place seem a little more than just a place for giving off sporadic comments in the updates.

Of course, I've never taken a single glance into those forums since almost a year ago now so I could be wrong about the activity occurring in them right now.